Lesbian scholarship has not had much use for psychoanalysis. Developing
in the political and intellectual context of feminism over the past two
decades, in the Eurowestern “First World,” lesbian critical writing has typically rejected Freud as the enemy of women and consequently avoided consideration of Freudian and neo-Freudian theories of sexuality. Certainly,
the feminist mistrust of psychoanalysis as both a male-controlled clinical
practice and a popularized social discourse on the “inferiority” of women
has excellent, and historically proven, practical reasons. Nevertheless, some
feminists have persistently argued that there are also very good theoretical
reasons for reading and rereading Freud himself. All the more so for lesbians, I suggest, whose self-definition, self-representation, and political as
well as personal identity are not only grounded in the sphere of the sexual,
but actually constituted in relation to our sexual difference from socially
dominant, institutionalized, heterosexual forms.
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One direction of my current work, of which this paper presents a small
but pivotal fragment, is to reread Freud's writings against the grain of the
dominant interpretations that construct a positive, “normal,” heterosexual
and reproductive sexuality, and to look instead for what I would call
Freud's negative theory of perversion. For it seems to me that, in his work

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